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‘Excellent’ rating for Presto4U at final EU review

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EU-funded project Presto4U has just had its final review. The project had two main goals: 1) to identify useful research results in the digital AV preservation domain and 2) to raise awareness and improve adoption of these results, by technology and service providers as well as media owners. The core group of 14 PrestoCentre member organisations can be very proud: all objectives and goals were achieved, they even exceeded the reviewer’s expectations. 

After two years of hard work ― the project ran from January 2013 until December 2014 ― Presto4U has delivered new tools and services that connect the different constituencies involved in AV media preservation: 

  • expert users, who understand the problems and require technological solutions; 
  • researchers, who can develop the fundamental knowledge, and
  • technology providers, who can commercialize research results as sustainable tools and services.

The Presto4U logo

Presto4U has assessed the impact of its work based on a continuous analysis of the existing landscape. What are the difficulties, problems, missing links and what is the economical and legal situation in AV media preservation? This way, the project partners have projected a perspective for the future. With the lessons learned in Presto4U we have identified how to continue actions through the PrestoCentre, and how the European AV sector is positioned to guide and enhance digital archiving.


Communities of Practice

In Presto4U, nine Communities of Practice (CoPs) were created, each based on a shared concern and a shared set of problems. All CoPs pursue technological solutions related to the particular practices and preservation challenges in a specific sub-sector of AV media. The communities, collectively and individually, have proven to be a crucial reference point and exchange environment - pooling the available expertise between the academic research, media, culture and industry sectors.
By establishing these CoPs and by relating the project outcomes directly to the needs of these groups, the project has succeeded to increase awareness. Now, there’s not only awareness about the threats to audiovisual heritage in the digital age, but also to the ways to avoid and combat these problems. These outcomes form the base for the reviewers to recommend continuing the good work of the CoPs and to include representatives from the CoPs in the innovation group of PrestoCentre.

An example of a CoP page: the Film Collections and Filmmakers Community of Practice. On the community-pages you can watch recorded presentations and webinars, read specific CoP newsletters and blogs and view other publications.

 

Dissemination

Within Presto4U, many activities took place to address common challenges, share knowledge and to learn from each other. The project partners have attended and contributed to numerous events, conferences, seminars and workshops hosted by professional associations like FIAT/IFTA, AMIA, IASA, DPC, IBC, FOCAL, BUFVC, FIAF.  

For instance, the “Screening The Future” conference was organised by Presto4U and PrestoCentre. This conference was designed to present and discuss the challenges identified by the project. Later workshops focused on collecting views and visions of digital audiovisual preservation challenges in the Communities of Practice. The special Preservathons (derived from the “Hackathon” concept) were organised to address main themes and challenges in AV digitisation, preservation and long-term access. Preservathon activities included workshops, role-playing, demonstrations, presentations and writing and negotiating exercises. A total of 12 webinars, 4 Community of Practice workshops (like this one in Paris) and 3 Preservathons were organised.
The Preservathons and webinars received very positive feedback from participants as well as the reviewers, who perceived them to be successful steering to completion of an international standard. The training materials, tools & services were considered to be of high quality. 

The set-up of the webinar at BBC. Jacqui Gupta (moderator), Richard Wright (Speaker), Tom Heritage (speaker) and Andy O’Dwyer (logistics).


Output

Presto4U has developed an assessment methodology for AV preservation research outputs and its implementation by evaluating a set of tools against this methodology. Tracking and mapping of AV research outputs both from commercial as well as research projects in the academic domain has proven to be valuable.

The project has contributed to the development of various standards (e.g., MPEG 21 Media Contract Ontology, EBU-MIM, Rights Ontology). These standards have been gathered in the Standards Register, which incorporates information on standards for content and metadata used across all communities involved in audiovisual digital preservation. In the Register, you can browse or search within all standards offered. 
An important part of the project revolved around the promotion of technology, standards and tools. This work is aimed at assimilating the knowledge gained through investigation of research outputs, as well as investigating the need for and use of standards, tools and relations with vendors. It led to the creation of an online Market Place, which is available through the PrestoCentre.


Presto4U integrated in PrestoCentre

Digital preservation in general has been widely addressed, but despite the strategic importance of the challenges, many of the solutions have still to reach more than a small fraction of the relevant stakeholders. On the one hand, the long-term preservation of complex media objects is still the subject of many open questions. On the other, the diversity of players makes it difficult to put available solutions into practice.

Early 2015, mr. Johan Oomen became managing director of PrestoCentre. He is proud to continue the valuable contribution Presto4U made to the archiving challenges at hand: “Presto4U has set up mechanisms for evaluating research outputs and brokering their translation into useful tools. It has helped to develop and spread models of best practice in media preservation, and promote the adoption of standards. PrestoCentre provided the means for communicating between CoPs, researchers, technology providers, industry bodies and standard organisations” PrestoCentre will further develop channels and means to address the challenges Presto4U successfully brought to the attention. It will continue to organise Preservathons, as a model for raising awareness around important issues and as a vehicle for stimulating cooperation. 
Presto4U webinars proved to be very helpful and popular, as did the training materials that were produced from these webinars. “The teaching tools that were developed under Presto4U have proven to be a valuable asset to PrestoCentre as a knowledge hub,” Johan Oomen states. “PrestoCentre will continue to offer these channels to the wider community.”

The Standards Register

The outreach, leverage and knowledge exchange activities developed by Presto4U have become essential services for PrestoCentre to attract smaller archives, organisations outside the broadcast centre, and technology suppliers.
Through the established Communities of Practice, the project has shown that competence is available and that Europe is leading in many aspects of AV digital preservation. The Preservathons and Workshops provided by Presto4U also demonstrated how the commercial sector of service providers can be actively engaged to the consumer communities to find areas of common benefit.
The Presto4U project met all its objectives permitting the PrestoCentre to be a consolidated place for expertise and knowledge as well as for tools and information regarding the audiovisual preservation chain.  The PrestoCentre has the position and ambition to continue its actions. Backed by a mature group of partners, over a hundred members and the future Innovation Group, the PrestoCentre team is looking forward to reinforce these relations.

Are you also dedicated to maintaining long-term access to our audiovisual media heritage? Become a PrestoCentre member! By sharing your expertise, using our online resources and services, and participating in our events, your Membership and involvement will contribute to preservation initiatives and continued innovation within the field.


Further reading on Presto4U

Reports and publications

 

Project partners